Jimmy Hawkins
Jimmy Hawkins is an actor, born 1941.
The credit that outlived the career came first. Hawkins was still a small child in 1946 when he played Tommy Bailey, youngest of the Bailey children in It's a Wonderful Life, a film that has been shown every December since. A run of uncredited kid parts followed: a boy in the park in Holiday Affair, a face at a store window in Winchester '73, a bit in A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, an early appearance in Moonrise.
Television is where the actual work was. He was Tagg Oakley across Annie Oakley, the sidekick job that meant a weekly paycheque, then Jerry Hager on The Donna Reed Show, with stints on Petticoat Junction, Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver. That amounts to a complete education in American family programming of the 1950s and 60s, most of it spent being the reliable kid rather than the funny one.
The adult career was shorter than the child one. Two Elvis Presley pictures, Girl Happy and Spinout, took him through the mid-60s, a guest turn on Kolchak: The Night Stalker closed out the screen work, and he moved into producing and writing instead. He resurfaced as himself in an AFI television special in 2002, which is what happens when your first job is a film nobody stops watching.
Movies (8)
TV (5)
Where to start with Jimmy Hawkins
Everyone arrives through It's a Wonderful Life and there is no argument for starting anywhere else, though the part is small and you will have to look for him. The real Hawkins performance is Annie Oakley, where as Tagg he had to carry scenes week after week opposite an adult lead, and does it without the mugging most child actors were taught.
The Donna Reed Show is the more polished sitcom version of the same skill. After that, pick by curiosity rather than quality: Girl Happy and Spinout are Elvis Presley vehicles where he is one of the gang, Petticoat Junction is rural CBS comfort food, and Kolchak: The Night Stalker is the one grown-up credit, a single guest slot in the best cult horror series of the 70s.